Nature's Teachings: Human Invention Anticipated by Nature

by J. G. Wood

So marvellously delicate is the instrument with regard to blood, that it detects the thousandth part of a grain of colouring matter in a blood-stain.

If upon the spectrum were printed the word BLOOD in the largest and blackest of capitals, it could not be more legible to an ordinary reader than are the two blood-bands to the eye of a spectroscopist. There is nothing like them in nature, and whether it be by association of ideas, or by absolute fact, these two bars have a strangely menacing look about them. Not only that, but if the blood should be that of a person suffocated with carbonic acid gas, the Spectroscope will say so.

Some years ago a man owed his life to the Spectroscope. A mysterious murder had been committed, and the police had arrested a man who was found near the spot. He could give no intelligible account of himself, and the sleeves of his coat and a part of his waistcoat were deeply stained with a red substance just like clotted blood. A piece of each garment was cut off and given to a well-known spectroscopist, who tried the red matter in the instrument, and at once declared it not to be blood. What it was he had not time to ascertain, so he sent it to a brother in science, who, after examination, pronounced it to be red gum.

By degrees, the man, who had been intoxicated when arrested, stated that he had been to see a friend who was a journeyman hatter. It was then found that he had been leaning on the workman’s board, and so had carried off some of the gummastic with which hats are stiffened. Had it not been for the infallible Spectroscope, the man might have lost his life.

Thus we see that the Spectroscope is the elephant’s trunk of optics, equally fitted for the greatest and smallest, the farthest and nearest, of objects. It is equally at home in earth and sky. When attached to the telescope, it reveals the constituents of the stars, and, when affixed to the microscope, it shows us the colouring matter of a green leaf. It produces the best steel, and detects adulteration in wine. And, lastly, as we have seen, it turns lawyer, and settles the evidence by which the life of a man is lost or saved. It can determine the purity of the smallest coinage, and tell us why a star changes in magnitude.

Yet all these wondrous revelations are made by a few prisms and a magnifying-glass. I possess a Spectroscope, made and presented to me by Mr. J. Browning, the celebrated optician. This astonishing instrument is only three inches long, and half an inch in diameter, so that it can be carried in the waistcoat pocket. I always keep mine in a finger of a white kid glove, which is amply sufficient for it. Yet it gives the spectrum of the sun with its principal lines, will detect the fraudulent wine merchant, and could have decided whether the accused man should be acquitted or hanged.

Marvellous and mighty as is this engine, it lay concealed in Nature ever since the sun’s rays shone upon earth and a drop of water existed. The Rainbow is nothing but a vast spectrum, a transverse slice of which would be a good representation of the coloured band which is shown in the instrument. It is prefigured in the ever-shifting rainbows of the water-fall and fountain, which latter may even be seen in the fountains of Trafalgar Square, while at the Crystal Palace their beauty has long been noticed.

There is not a dewdrop which is not a miniature Spectroscope, as it glitters with its wondrous iridescence in the rays of the rising sun; there is not an opal with its shifting hues, nor the splendour of the soap-bubble, nor the nacre of the common river mussel or the ormer shell, which does not owe its beauty to the same principles which govern the Spectroscope. Every green leaf, and blue or pink or yellow petal, every varying tint of the mackerel sky, every blaze of sunset and bluegrey of sunrise, owes its beauty to those wondrous laws of light which had been hidden for so many centuries, until they were unveiled by the simple prism of the Spectroscope. As in so many instances, the revelation lay concealed until the coming of the revealer, whose inspired hand raised the dark veil of centuries.

The Thaumatrope.

Middle-aged persons will recollect that since the days of their childhood a great variety of optical apparatus has been invented ending in the word “trope.” This is a Greek word, signifying to turn, and is given to the instruments because they revolve.